'Heir to the Glimmering World': Sects and the City

ON the one hand, "glimmer" means a feeble, tremulous or intermittent light. On the other, a glimmerer in 16th-century England was a beggar woman, often with a sham license, who claimed to have lost her belongings to fire. On the third hand, there are the recorded glimmerings of old myths in the minds of poets and a transfigured Jesus in the Godhead. Nor should we forget that in such semishadow one sees ghosts.

In her typically audacious new novel, "Heir to the Glimmering World," Cynthia Ozick braids at least three and probably four ghostly glimmers and "phantom eels" of thought into a single luminous lariat -- or maybe a hangman's noose. Anything goes when she's making things up. While the Second Commandment on graven images presides over her fiercely prescriptive essays (four idol-smashing volumes of them since "Art & Ardor" in 1983), Ozick's fiction is shamanistic, almost wanton (five completely different novels, three dazzling collections of stories plus a "Shawl" since 1966). However much she always insists on "a certain corona of moral purpose" for fiction that wants to be better than journalism, she can't help dancing in the air like Feingold in "Levitation," like Chagall with the cows, or Flannery O'Connor.

In 1935, 18-year-old Rose Meadows, orphaned, bright, bookish, broke, "mainly a watcher and a listener" and just evicted from her cousin Bertram's apartment by his obnoxious Communist girlfriend, answers an Albany newspaper ad for someone to assist a family that has recently arrived from Berlin and is shortly to move to "the true city" of New York. Though it isn't clear if Rose is expected to be a secretary to Rudolf Mitwisser (a scholar obsessed with the 1,200-year-old Jewish heresy of Karaism), a nursemaid to his invalid wife, Elsa (a physicist booted out of her lab by the Nazis), or a nanny to their five difficult children, she is the only applicant for the job, with nowhere else to go.

Later we learn that the Mitwissers are financed in their "makeshift, provisional, resentful" exile by James A'Bair, a mercurial philanthropist and alcoholic who shows up only when he deigns to, with dolls, bird cages, roller skates, typewriters and cash. Surprisingly often, in fact, strangers appear at the Mitwisser house in the Bronx with their own agendas, like beggars with sham licenses -- competing scholars of Karaism, a Bombay philosopher turned Brooklyn tailor who cracks jokes about "materialism," Rose's cousin Bertram after blacklisting, and his Communist girlfriend, Ninel, on her way to die in the Spanish Civil War, not to mention Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Henry James and Scheherazade -- but none of them can put Humpty Dumpty together again. Or European culture, either.

See Rudi, with his blue eyes like Dutch porcelain, his heavy black winter suit and his doubts about his wife's fidelity; a devoted father refusing to inquire into the whereabouts of his oldest daughter; a reader of Schiller who forbids the speaking of German in his home; a sober bourgeois stuck in an "oceanic library of negation and mutiny," of "fevered and forgotten" schismatics and "their creeds and codes and calendars, their migrations and mutations," who claims in his mania to have uncovered "the labyrinth of renunciation from abyss to abyss, until in the bottommost depth of bottomlessness there is nothing to breathe, only the vacuum of the One God, the One true God, God the heretic, who disbelieves in man, who casts off this worshipful creature for the charlatan he is." See Rudi, "a mummy whose wrappings had been stolen away," fall sobbing into the arms of an astonished Rose.

his Nobel-prize-winning wave equation in Zurich in 1926, who shared with Erwin, along with her body, a love of Goethe, botany and Italian painting, who earned a fellowship at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in spite of her female sex and Jewish religion. Look at her, vole-faced, sly and shoeless among ladybugs and goose feathers, "sunk into an an ongoing strangeness, something deeper than lethargy, and more perplexing," "expelled from the history of the electron," cutting up pillows, puncturing her own skin, tearing out every page of Jane Austen's "Sense and Sensibility," then writing on the corner of one of those torn pages the formula for entropy, for "thermodynamical equilibrium," with a D for Death. Rudi thinks she's crazy but Rose knows better: "True madness will not recant. Was she Hamlet, for whom madness is ruse and defense and trap, or was she Ophelia, whom true madness submerges? . . . Privy to magickings and delusions denied to others, she shrank herself at will. She was a little woman with unknowable powers."

See James, teaching kids how to read by paying them to do so, trying to spend all the riches his father made by using little Jimmy in a series of best-selling "Bear Books" for children; a fugitive from his own exploited childhood, a dropout forever on the road with no place to go, a vagabond on the small-town, little-theater and one-ring-circus circuit, puppet shows and carousels, a jet stream and a vapor trail abroad, indifferent to all three religions in Jerusalem and smoking kif in Algiers, until he finds in the "hauntedness" and "precariousness" of the Mitwissers -- in the very idea of exile, deviance and heresy -- a nihilistic frisson, a thrill he can use to rub himself alert. If what happened so very long ago at Sinai was that "the minds of men were given the power to read the mind of God," nobody told a conscienceless James. He will take something away. And he will leave behind blood and money.

See, finally, the Rose whose own high school algebra-teaching father was a gambler, a liar and a trickster; Rose, a cool customer who grew up modeling herself a bit too much on Jane Eyre, "formal," "prim and smug"; who loves libraries and wants only to read books already read before by "phantom companions and secret friends"; who, like the young Cynthia Ozick, first hears the Communist Manifesto as "a psalm"; and who, on the basis of her experience with the Mitwissers, abandons the notion of Europe as cute (Pinocchio, Becky Sharp, Sidney Carton) for the notion of Europe as sinister ("a dense volcanic mass concealed under a disintegrating black veil") -- this Rose, a stranger in a household "sinking still more deeply into wilderness -- the boys at war, underwear unwashed, pots boiling over," becomes their hedge against anarchy and their "hidden engine of survival." No wonder she loves being told in a letter that "I reflect on your small lips with rapture!" She needs to run away herself.

Never mind the Communist girlfriend, so negligently travestied that she might as well be the airhead mother in "Trust." Lefties in Ozick's fiction are as rudely caricatured as Palestinians in her essays, or Primo Levi before he killed himself, or Miami in "The Shawl."

Otherwise, "Heir to the Glimmering World" is both a chambered nautilus and a haunted house -- a fairy tale with locked rooms, mad songs, secret books and stolen babies. And a children's story, an Oedipal grief, about killing fathers and moving on. And a sendup of Victorian novels that solve their problems with fortuitous marriage, sudden death, miraculous inheritance, emigration to Australia or all of the above. But also a grim parable about "purifications" -- by fundamentalist ascetics like the Karaites, repudiators of the rabbis and Talmudic commentary; by Hindu skeptics like the Nastiks, who mocked the priests in the Upanishads by comparing them to white dogs in a procession, each holding in its mouth the tail of the next in line; by the sages of high German humanism, who conferred on credulous communicants like Rudi and Elsa a counterfeit comfort, a fraudulent dignity, and the illusion of a bildung whose possession meant you were "more than merely cultivated," you were "ideally purified by humanism, an aristocrat of sensibility and wisdom"; and, of course, by National Socialism, with its death-camp refinements.

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And for each specter there's a veil of text: to Rose's father in a poker game, James A'Bair will deliberately lose his original "Bear Book," the Bear Boy's personal copy of the first edition in his father's lucrative series, wherein that father never let his son be himself. Like Christopher Robin and A. A. Milne, "he was his father's commentary on his body and brain," forced to speak in verse. Not only "Hard Times" and "Sense and Sensibility" get a workout, but so do George Eliot, the Brontës and Ozick's by now familiar love-hate relationship with Henry James, who seems to be in the room when Rudi dictates to Rose: "I caught -- if not his meaning -- his imperative, that urge below thought that beat in his brain. It pulsed against me mothlike, and I snatched it out of the darkening air. More and more it seemed to me that I inhabited his mind. Or the reverse: his mind came to me. I pinched it between my finger and thumb."

And there is a whole disputatious literature of Karaism out of Babylon, Cairo and Leningrad, of, by and for literalists, apostates and lunatics, "inked letters seeping through the backs of the pages of old chronicles: faint glyphs glimmering, just visible, an inside-out alphabet" -- even without our having to pronounce on the veracity of the two pages purporting to be a fragment of a 10th-century treatise on the Bhagavad-Gita by the brainiest of all the Karaites during their golden age, Jacob al-Kirkisani: "I, Jacob, am become Arjuna," he may have said. Or is this another of Ozick's forgeries, like the Yiddish poems in "Envy" ("Where are the speakers of ancient Etruscan? Who was the last man to write poems in Linear B"?) or the Stockholm "Messiah" that Bruno Schulz certainly never imagined (a scarecrow, a windmill, with sails, flippers, petals and tattoos)?

Plus one last veil, to stretch a point: that Schrödinger wave equation, "the explosion of seeing, the possibility that had until that instant eluded them, the idea that the object of their passion, like a wave of the sea, was after all not guaranteed to linger in one place, it was a force not a thing, their wild-hearted wandering fickle electron!"

It's not just that Elsa sees that her own mind is "at all costs not guaranteed to linger in one place." Nor that, if we look up the real Erwin's vita, we find that his science had indeed been mediocre until those surprising six months in sexy Zurich in 1926. It's that from quantum mechanics we got not only Planck's constant and Heisenberg's uncertainty, but complementarity and indeterminism. In other words, we were problematized.

Finally, I must tell you some things about the Karaites that Ozick doesn't because she can't; precognition is against the rules. Nobody knew it in 1935, but the Nazis would end up giving the Karaites a pass. As they had earlier petitioned the czars of Russia, arguing that they weren't even Israelites and so couldn't possibly have been Christ-killers, so the Karaites persuaded Heinrich Himmler himself to treat them like Turks and Tatars. They actually served in the Waffen SS.

If we dig deep in the archives, we even find opportunistic and meretricious connections being faked between Karaites and the Khazars, those Turkish tribesmen between the Caucasus and the Volga, the Black Sea and the Caspian, who inexplicably converted to Judaism around 740 A.D., causing books to be written by Arthur Koestler and Milorad Pavic. The head starts to hurt. You want to go to Target and buy a red-string cabala bracelet to charm off evil eyes.

So think of "Glimmering" as a "Turn of the Screw" in which the ghosts are from the dreadful future. Think of the Mitwissers as the wreckage left behind by the beast, a muddle of teapots, crystal sets, Spanish dolls, black limos, fireflies, uniforms and shame: "What is broken, gentlemen, you cannot put it again back, nicht wahr?"

Almost the last thing Rose tells us concerns Jacob al-Kirkisani: "He had seen the Ganges, he had defended Scripture against the false adornments of men, he had uncovered heresy in the Godhead itself. He had tunneled like a worm into Mitwisser's brain. His bones were Mesopotamian dust, yet they had permitted me to witness ecstasy." And the last thing Ozick seems to be saying in this brilliant apostrophe to shattered worlds is that ecstasy is overrated.

John Leonard review books for Harper's Magazine and The Nation, television for New York magazine and movies for "CBS News Sunday Morning."